“I thought it would,” Martha said. “Anyway it will clear the last of the fog.”
Martha enjoyed her chocolate sundae which had all the appeal of forbidden fruit. I had coffee with a Danish pastry and looked constantly at my watch, watching the minutes creep nearer and nearer to two and hoping I would be able to get a taxi back to the car park.
Martha was on about the straw-coloured walls and curtains again so I could just say yes or no every so often and think about Dobbie and that if Martha knew what was in my mind she’d have a fit and enough to gossip about till doomsday.
We asked for the bill and time was getting on now so I’d have to hurry. I went downstairs to tidy up my face while Martha waited for it. When I came back the waitress still hadn’t brought it and I began to get agitated because of the rain and it mightn’t be so easy to get a taxi and Dobbie would be waiting so I said do you mind awfully Martha if I go? She said where’s the fire and I said it’s nearly two and I need to get somewhere before it closes. It sounded ridiculous as I said it because everything closed for lunch at one if it was going to and opened again at two. Martha said all right, I’m not in a rush, and why don’t you come in tonight? Not doing anything are you? Tonight seemed such a long way off. Two o’clock was the edge of the world and I couldn’t think any further so I said, I’m not certain, I’ll ring you, and stepped into Wigmore Street and into the rain forgetting to pay for my lunch.
PART TWO
One
Rain, with a sharp tug at memory, always took me back to the day Tim and I became engaged. It was hard to believe that between then and now nineteen years, somewhere, somehow, had passed. ‘A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone.’ Time and the Conways. It was a curious thing, time; you never knew what had happened to it except when you were young and it dragged. The party or holiday you were waiting for seemed never to come nearer. In winter the summer was a lifetime away; when it did arrive it promised falsely to endure for ever. Now time had wings; seven-league boots, too. When Tim and I got married people celebrating Silver Weddings were out of our orbit. Now we were well on the way ourselves. Years number one to fifteen of marriage were the delusory ones, the ones in which you painlessly changed from identification with the bride to that of the bride’s mother when you went to a wedding. You could not pinpoint the precise spot. At one moment you were dreaming up the aisle, moved to tears by Lohengrin, sure that all was going to be hearts and flowers, and the next you were imagining it was your own daughter leaving the nest, the desire to be taken with tugging at you. Somewhere along the line the emphasis subtly shifted. You were a child, then you were your own mother. You recognised her gestures in your mirror; understood with clarity, what it was all about.
Things like photographs put the dipstick into the sands of time. Ours were kept theoretically in an album, but actually in a collection of cardboard boxes and carrier bags. They were filled to overflowing with a miscellany of prints, coloured and black-and-white, straight and deckle-edged, from home and abroad. They ranged from Robin and Diana naked on rugs as babies, we never remembered to write names and dates so often couldn’t be sure which was which, through their first garden swing, Robin in rompers, to Diana, complete with hat, on our recent Italian jaunt. Tim had changed from a slight, almost emaciated young man to a more stolid edition with slightly receding hair. I had progressed through ludicrously long and dowdy hair and skirts to the fashion of the day, which tomorrow would be equally ridiculous.
There was one photograph of Tim and me in the early days on the beach at Bognor, leaping up to catch a ball. It perpetuated a moment you knew was irretrievably gone. Moments, too, were preserved in our boxes of those whose days were numbered. Tim’s Aunt Millicent enjoying tomato sandwiches in our garden. Had she known that two weeks later she was to fall and die as the result of a fractured femur she would not have grinned so broadly. David, gap-toothed, from Robin’s class who had dashed across the road under a bus. My Uncle Rupert, importantly paunched, who had seemed so indispensable at the Bar, struck down by a cerebral haemorrhage. These faces put the thumbprints upon the passage of the years. Their images, captured in Kodacolor, now gone, brought home the evanescence of our days.
In the nineteen years that had come and passed we had been engaged and married, improved our financial position, reared two children, and moved house. Looking back it did not seem possible that we had actually lived, making decisions, from day to day through so many years. Like a dream they slipped irrevocably by. Sometimes, alerted to sudden awareness of their passing, by birthdays or christenings or anniversaries or deaths, I determined to treat the days less lightly, seize them with either hand. It was no good. There was too much to think about. Too much to do. They became consumed in a busy-ness of living, fragmented by the constant effort to keep up with commitments; education and clothes and dentists and haircuts and holidays and homework and insurance and income and income-tax and entertainment and illness and charity and the elements and curtains and carpets and new accounts for Tim and maids and dailies and saving for the children’s future and pipes that burst and central heating and trees to be lopped and the scare of smallpox and bus strikes and the general trauma of everyday life. It seemed a physical impossibility to keep track of the days let alone to nurture them.
We had had thoughts now and again, like everyone, of getting off the treadmill; of emigrating to California where at least you hadn’t the worry of keeping warm or to the peace of the countryside. It was nothing but a pipedream though, recurring every so often. We knew that no matter where we went the problems would come with us and that we were not alone on the hurdy-gurdy; it was the price of civilisation.
The business of time had always intrigued me. My grandmother who died just after the war having remained, as the old often did, quite unmoved by it except as it touched her own comfort, had I knew to clean her knives with paste, no stainless steel then, to wash up without benefit of detergents, let alone mechanical aid, to physically haul her washing and water in and out of the copper, which I remember stood in her basement, and to grind her own salt. She gave birth, the hard way, no gas-and-air machine, to seven children, reared five of them and was as far as I remembered a woman of great serenity. We had photographs of her sitting sedately in her garden beneath a tree, on a hard chair, looking as if she had not a care in the world. I did half as much with twice as much assistance and still there seemed scarcely a moment to breathe. Even my mother ran a contemplative finger over the synthetic surfaces of my equipment, searched for rubbish to put, fascinated, down the waste-grinder, and mused on the number of dishes and napkins she had washed or had caused to be washed over the years. What I wanted to know was the whereabouts of the great chunks of leisure I should have had at my disposal. True I could get out of the house for short spells but usually rushing somewhere for something, neither appreciating nor putting to good use the gifts of time donated by Mrs Mac, and the automation with which I was surrounded. Tim was not the sort of husband who demanded to know what I had done with every minute of my day; sometimes I would have found it hard to tell him. The dishes were washed automatically and so were the clothes, dried too, the rooms dusted and Hoovered by Mrs Mac. The things I actually did seemed so trivial yet took so long. Often I tried to think what they were, these nebulous, ever-present chores that rose from the vacuum created by the machinery to occupy me and others like me in the village. They could be said in a breath, quickly. Each task however took its five, ten, or fifteen minutes from the day. The time-motion studies which were always being done on behalf of the housewife took into account the obvious jobs such as bedmaking, cooking and cleaning. They did not allow for putting out dead flowers, picking up the trail of petals you dropped on the way, counting the laundry, trying frustratedly to get it all into the box, making lists, of groceries to be bought, jobs to do, telephoning dentists for appointments, service departments of machinery that had gone wrong, taking things upstairs that had found their way downstairs and vice-versa
, suits to be pressed, taken, and collected, shoes to be mended, two journeys likewise, hair to be cut, clothes to be purchased, altered, repaired, plants to be watered, leaves cleansed with milk, parcels sorted for jumble, for Oxfam, broken shoelaces, burned saucepans, upset buttons or pins, prescriptions at the chemists, birthday presents for Robin’s friends, Diana’s, their own parties to be organised; most of all they turned an oblivious eye on the eternal tidying; pieces of string and brown paper and torn-out recipes and paper bags of things to go back to the stores and hair bands and guns and gloves and macs and boots and books and swimming costumes and dried-up Grip-fix. Every day was filled; seven of them to a week. It seemed to be always Monday or Friday and suddenly Easter approaching and last summer’s clothes not fitting, then summer and winter again, jumpers washed beyond redemption, wrists out of heavy coats, and Christmas to worry about, presents and brussels sprouts, and almost before your fork was out of the Christmas pudding, spring. There should have been a button to slow it all down. At the rate we were going I felt that in no time I would be looking at a wrinkled face in the mirror and thinking with panic, this cannot be me. That was if I grew to be wrinkled. So many of our acquaintances seemed to be having breasts removed or coronary thromboses, one, two, three and then it was poor old John or Jennie, never had a day’s illness in their lives, conversation meat for a while then nothing. We might all, of course, be nothing quite shortly, in spite of all the marching, in which case the whole thing, everything, was a complete waste anyway so it really didn’t matter how you filled your days.
If the time in years since my engagement to Tim had gone like a tape wound at speed the difference between the two worlds, then and now, was so great it would not have been surprising if the years that separated them had been twice that number. The war, although we did not know it, was drawing to its close. We lived in a world of ration books and points and blackouts and careless talk costing lives. At night we could see a vague glow in the sky from the incendiaries they dropped on London. We didn’t know about nylon stockings, drip-dry or instant anything, bananas, cream, biscuits in lovely shiny packets, bicycles for birthdays, holidays abroad, or many of the other things we took for granted today. After nineteen years the dried milk, powdered eggs, and liquid paraffin with which we cooked were only a joke as were the Spitfires, Mosquitoes, and Hurricanes, with which we fought and prevailed. To Robin and Diana the era was as remote as the Middle Ages. When Tim and I laughed about it, remembering the funny side, the other was too grim, families left with telegrams when it was over instead of sons, it assumed a fairy-tale-like quality too.
In the village to which I had been evacuated I went to school. Most of the girls in the sixth form and many of the younger ones too – it was a status symbol to wear somebody’s wings or anchor – had boyfriends in the services. Our talk was peppered with expression such as give me the gen, bags of panic, what a wizzo place, good show, piece of cake, cutting a rug, had it; terms which had died a lingering death in post-war England breathing their last when people like Tim, even today, after so many years got excited. We danced, with each other in the gym, to sentimental tunes like Spring will be a little late this year, jived to Holiday for Strings, collected salvage indefatigably, saw films like The Way Ahead, Henry V and Since You Went Away. We could laugh now with the chasm almost as great as that from the nineteen-fourteen lot. The rubble had been razed and from the dung-heap our cold-war, nuclear-threatening, twisting, with-it, Continent-hopping, teddy-boy-infested generation had arisen; Robin and Diana’s world; what would they do with it?
The highlights of my life at that time were letters from Tim, whose wings I wore proudly on my blazer, and his leaves. The letters bore the legend on active service, the stamp of the censor, and Tim’s rank and number. I still had them. They were strangely lacking in terms of actual news. You could feel the censor breathing over his shoulder. From them I learned that the life somewhere in Europe was one of great, stifling tedium, except when there was a job on, meaning a raid somewhere, and that Tim had become a war-weary zombie, interested only in baths and sleep and getting out and that he loved me, missed me, and clung for reason and sanity to my image. I kept his in a silver frame, by my bed.
Looking back, the demarcation between peace and war existed only palely. It seemed that at one moment we were leading our untroubled existence in Wimbledon, Tim, Gray, and I and occasionally Dobbie, having graduated from Monopoly to rummy and billiards on Saturday afternoons, and the next everything had been shaken up. Gray went off to the Army leaving our mother in a perpetual state of alarm and despondency, Tim to the Air Force, eventually to find himself with Dobbie his Commanding Officer, and myself to a strange country school. When Gray went away my mother cried at the coarse uniform and the heavy boots and every time they played Ma, I miss your apple pie on the radio. She hated to think of him roughing it although Gray didn’t mind a bit. We stopped needling each other, Gray and I, and grew up suddenly and began talking to each other as adults. When he came on leave he usually brought with him two or three other spotty young servicemen with ridiculous army haircuts. They were grateful for all my mother was able to provide them with out of the rations and seemed not to know what to do with their clumsy feet. It was odd to see Gray shining his own boots, there had always been someone to do it for him, and with his hands red and roughened from the various fatigues he had to do. He changed gradually, from leave to leave, from a soft-looking schoolboy to a soldier with the muscles of a navvy. He came home fairly regularly at first then he said I may not be seeing you for a bit, Ma. He disappeared for two years during which time Mother’s hair turned white. There weren’t any tints and rinses then, of course, so she stayed that way, looking years younger now than she did then, worrying about Gray and crying into the butter ration when she thought no-one was looking.
Before they all joined up Tim and I were together a lot but usually with a group when he wasn’t at our house. There was Gray and a Frank Hankin who was going to be a playwright and was killed at Dunkirk. There was Irene Douglas, who lived round the corner, and was my best friend and married a clean young American from West Point. She now lived in Los Angeles from where we corresponded spasmodically. The clean young American had become an executive in a large family candy concern. Whenever I thought of Irene it was sitting on the edge of a pool, her own, with two clean American children, in the yard of her clean American home, without a care in the sun-drenched world.
At that time we all belonged to a youth club. We had play readings and earnest discussions and I danced cheek to cheek with Tim who took me home. In the summer we went on rambles into the country. We took the train to the nearest point, meeting early at the station with our rucksacks, and walked. After lunch we paired off and it was usually me and Tim, Gray with a variety of girls. We’d lie on the grass and talk about ourselves and what we were going to do and tickle each other with blades of grass and kiss with adolescent innocence. Afterwards suffused with warmth and delight, we’d walk back with arms round each other’s waists.
When Tim joined up I went to the station. Now I couldn’t go to Waterloo or Paddington or any of the other main lines without thinking of that day. The platforms were jam-packed with a milling, moving mass of grey and khaki loaded with lumpy packs. Wherever you looked people were surging towards trains and buffets, or clinging to each other. Girls with square-shouldered dresses and shoulder length hair entwined themselves around their men with tears rolling down despairing faces. Mothers cried unashamedly, fathers looked embarrassed. For the most part the men themselves appeared bewildered. Tim’s mother hadn’t come, she didn’t like stations, his father was in Ireland on Government business; only Gray and I. His uniform was very new. He’d gone through the preliminary stages and now was going away for training somewhere in the North. When it was time to go he said goodbye to Gray and turned to me. I felt a bit awkward because of Gray then Tim put his arms round me and I didn’t any more and we were clinging to each other like everyone else and
kissing ferociously. I promised to write and Tim said he’d miss me. Our kisses were different, desperate and afraid, though innocent still. He was my man going to war, my thing to live for. I was his girl.
After that there were letters and leaves and hours spent on the stairs in each other’s arms and walking, as one, in the blackout. At school I found it difficult to concentrate sometimes, knowing he was waiting. Our letters and our meetings became more and more intense until both of us could think of little else.
The school, which was in the village, was two miles away from the little house we had rented. I often thought when Robin and Diana went off in the car how horrified they’d be if they had to walk two miles anywhere, let alone twice a day to school. We’d been rehearsing a play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which I was Julia. It was pitch dark when I got out, because of no street lights and the blackout, and pouring, but really pouring with rain. I had my torch with the blue paper covering the bulb as stipulated but could scarcely see an inch ahead. The village was deserted, everyone indoors at their tea. After I’d walked about a mile up the hill towards home I was fed up and completely soaked, my feet squelching in every puddle on the muddy road. My torch was almost useless and my satchel weighed a ton. Perhaps when I got home there would be a letter from Tim.
I turned a corner and a figure loomed up in front of me. I said sorry and side-stepped. You were always bumping into people in the blackout. A familiar voice said, Liz, and it was Tim.
I was never so glad to see anyone. I dropped my satchel in a puddle and we stood there in each other’s arms the rain pelting down. We rubbed our wet faces together kissing and I had never been so happy. It was some time before I noticed there was something different about him then I saw it was the peaked cap and knew that he’d been made an officer.
The Commonplace Day Page 13
